On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Igor Stasenko <siguctua@gmail.com> wrote:

2009/5/7 Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda@gmail.com>:

>I intend to add immediate characters within the next few months.
>

so, does that means that you will extend the oop tag to 2 bits (or more)?

Yes.  Keep 31-bit SmallIntegers, provide e.g. 24-bit immediate characters.  Andreas wrote a thorough sketch of this scheme in 2006.

 

Or just reserve a non-movable heap space for character objects, like:
isCharacterObject: oop
 ^ oop >= charsStart and: [ oop < charsEnd ]

No. This doesn't scale to unicode.  The tagged approach provides much faster string access, and identity comparison for all characters, not just the byte range.